This invention generally relates to a pill feeding mechanism, and more particularly to orienting a group of pills, and controlling a flow rate, orientation, and interval of the group of pills exiting the pill feeding mechanism.
Pharmacies and chemists often dispense pills to customers or patients on receiving a prescription from the customer or patient. The pharmacist working at the pharmacy will often manually identify, verify and count pills based on the prescription received prior to providing the customer with the pills prescribed. Often, a pharmacist may miscount the number pills to provide to the customer, which results in the customer not receiving the prescribed number of pills. Further, the pharmacist may accidentally provide the customer with different pills than those prescribed to the customer, can be harmful to the customer. To overcome these problems, automated systems and various methods have been developed to count and/or identify pills. However, to function efficiently and accurately, the automated methods often require, as an input, a controlled rate of flow of pills having a controlled orientation. Thus, it is beneficial for accurate and efficient pill identification, verification, and counting that a system be developed to provide the automated systems with a controlled rate of flow of pills having a controlled orientation.